He's only 35 years old, but Nathan Myhrvold has enough to say about
computing to last him at least another 35. With a PhD in physics from Princeton
University, he taught himself programming, read Donald Knuth, and founded a
software company with grad-school cronies. He holds the most prestigious of
jobs in a company built on prestige: after joining Microsoft in 1986, Myhrvold
became chief "technologist" by 1989; the head honcho overseeing 650 serfs in
research and advanced product development. "I work directly for Bill, and
research works directly for me," he says. And this year he's one of six
executives promoted to Microsoft's Bill-centered "office of the president."
Meanwhile, Myhrvold remains a nerd among nerds who reads science magazines and
dreams of deploying the insights of physical science to master that still
unkempt discipline of economics.

Stewart Brand met up with Myhrvold during the TED conference this past spring
to hear him hold forth on everything from software efficiency to sci-fi.

Wired

: What has come to be called Moore's Law was first proposed
by Gordon Moore in 1965. He said that the number of components on a microchip
had doubled every year since 1959, and that the trend would continue until
1975. These days, Moore's Law is treated as a general statement that computers
get drastically better every year - faster, cheaper, smaller - and that this
will occur indefinitely. I take it that you see Moore's Law as something quite
fundamental?

Myhrvold

: The way Moore's Law occurs in computing is really
unprecedented in other walks of life. If the Boeing 747 obeyed Moore's Law, it
would travel a million miles an hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a
trip to New York would cost about five dollars. Those enormous changes just
aren't part of our everyday experience.

The whole hardware industry has experienced the phenomenon in which every time
computers get cheaper, they appeal to a new set of users; every time they get
more powerful, old customers upgrade. But it turns out that like hardware,
software also has to undergo something like Moore's Law. I did a study of a
variety of Microsoft products: I counted the number of lines of code for
successive releases. Basic had 4,000 lines of code in 1975. Currently, it has
perhaps half a million. Microsoft Word was at 27,000 lines of code in the first
version. It's now about 2 million. So, we have increased the size and
complexity of software even faster than Moore's Law. In fact, this is why there
is a market for faster processors - software people have always consumed new
capability as fast or faster than the chip people could make it available.

Wired

: How do you measure software efficiency?

Myhrvold

: If you write your own software, which is generally true for
mainframes or supercomputers, for every dollar that you spend on software
development, you get about a buck's worth of software. It's a 1 to 1 ratio.
Now, if you look at minicomputers, you will find that the people in those
industries typically have 1,000 to 10,000 customers. They can afford to spend
considerably more on development and still maintain a decent return on
investment. When you spend US$10,000 to buy a minicomputer software package,
the company probably spent $100,000 to $1 million developing it. So, if you're
buying from that market, for every dollar you spend, you get somewhere between
$10 and $1,000 worth of software. Then you come to the PC industry, where for
every $100 you spend, you get a piece of software that cost someone $100
million to develop.

A dollar buys a million dollars' worth of software.

Call it Myhrvold's Law. As the software becomes more complex, doesn't the
likelihood of problems tend to increase? And when you always have to have new
software, won't it always have new problems?

We have gone from 27,000 lines of code to 2 million lines of code for the same
money. If I say I've got two versions of Word - that old one from 1982 that's
perfect, with zero defects; or the new one that's got all this cool new stuff,
but there might be a few bugs in it - people always want the new one. But I
wouldn't want them to operate a plane I was on with software that happened to
be the latest greatest release!

Stewart Brand is a co-founder of The Well, the Hackers' Conference, and the Global Business Network. His 1987 book, The Media Lab, is still in print.-35